Recently I decided that I wanted to switch from Windows 10 to a Linux distro as my primary operating system. Mainly because I've always found that the dev environments are a lot better on Linux (personally) and that I have a lot more freedom to mess around with the OS.
But the hardest decision was which do I chose? Linux is an
Open source, meaning anyone is free to commit code and obviously create their own operating system. Personally I went with Linux Mint (Cinnamon) for my new OS. But I still had other options in mind.
I made a table to showcase what I took into consideration, hopefully it may help you if you switch to Linux.
| OS | Environment | Purpose | Based on | Expertise required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mint | Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, KDE | General | Ubuntu, Debian | Low |
| Debian | GNOME, KDE, XFCE. LXDE (many more) | Community based, server, general use, other distros | N/A | Medium |
| Ubuntu | Unity | General | GNOME (Recent return) (Parts in Debian) | Low |
| Manjaro | Cinnamon, Enlightenment, XFCE, GNOME (+ others) | General | Arch | Medium |
| Arch | Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE | General use, server | N/A | High (pain to install) |
| Fedora | GNOME, KDE | General, testing sandbox | Red Hat | Medium |
| CentOS | GNOME, KDE | General, server | N/A | High |
I looked into quite a lot of Linux Distros before coming to my conclusion, these are the key factors I took into consideration before selecting. Before selecting I suggest you have a look at This website it allows choosing a distro based on your preferences and usage a lot easier.
In addition if you're dual booting it can be a pain in the ass to switch your OS every time in the BIOS. A friend of mine has shown me the rEFInd project it presents a customizable interface on boot to allow you to select your chosen OS.
Happy deving!
Top comments (78)
While Arch is a pain to install, it's worth noting that it's a very rewarding experience and the wiki documentation and community support is generally pretty good. You can also find most packages in aur collection
Well, for someone new to Linux I would definitely recommend Antergos or Manjaro instead of Arch.
I have been using the GNU system with Linux for some years now, and for roughly a year I've been an Antergos user.
Prior to that, I had tried Manjaro, and prior to that, Linux Mint.
I switched to Linux Mint from Ubuntu, because I loved Cinnamon. I switched to Manjaro from Linux Mint, because I love the rolling release model (although Manjaro can't fully use that term).
I switched from Mint because I had full disk encryption, and a bug in the OS lost where my decryption key was located on the filesystem, ergo my system could never boot into my environment, and I lost everything. Needless to say, that's a pretty bad bug.
I switched to Manjaro w/ Cinnamon (Community Edition) because of rolling release. Back when '17, the Cinnamon CE gave me headaches from bugs... I couldn't stand it. So I decided to try Antergos, which is Arch w/ some preinstalled software PLUS with a GUI installer.
Antergos is very slick, and very flexible & powerful. I get all the benefits of Arch without any of the headache. Plus, I get a more true rolling release model than Manjaro. Also, the sponsors for Antergos are phenomenal (eg. JetBrains).
I highly recommend anyone, both beginner and experienced, to try Antergos. It uses the
pacmantool which is very different fromapt, BUT you get access to the Arch User Repository (AUR), which, for me, is the biggest benefit of the Arch family.If anyone has any questions about Antergos, or how to use
pacman, etc., feel free to contact me. :)I tried Manjaro. I was constantly fixing the system, because of issues with packages. Was not fun. After that, I decided to opt-out for Manjaro and the like. That was years ago.
Three days back, I fixed a Manjaro of a friend. That took me half an hour to get the package management back to working.
You get the newest packages. You pay it with an unstable base. It is constantly destructing itself. I can't recommend Arch and the like for anyone.
Not all rolling release distros are unstable. Solus OS, a fairly new rolling release Linux distro not based on anything, is quite stable.
That pain to install and initial config of wi-fi and touchpad etc. was entertaining. I've devoted some time to tinker around and all is good, but then I just want to plug in a flash drive or use network printer... gah!
I'd recommend checking out Solus, works pretty well, does some innovative stuff,easy to use and install. They also support snaps so even if no package available, you can install. Though that seems less of an issue these days. If you kind of like arch but want something interesting that makes it easier to replicate your install, check out nixos. It has a learning curve, but it installs everything based on a config file or two, which is kind of what arch used to do years ago.
Yes, you should have a look at Solus.
I installed on my computer a few months ago and reallt loved it.
But at the end I came back to Ubuntu Budgie, which has the best of both world.
The Budgie (Solus) desktop on an Ubuntu distribution. So you can install everything that works on Ubuntu.
The SunOS that Illumos was born from was SunOS 5/Solaris — originally a SysV-derived OS. The 80s SunOS that was derived from BSD was SunOS 4.
Illumos was one of the projects I played with late in the part of my career where I was Solaris engineer for a a global ISP. A number of us looked at Illumos and Nexenta because Oracle kept throwing the viability of OpenSolaris in doubt ...before eventually killing it altogether. Both were options where we could have Solaris-y systems at home, keeping our work-related skills up, without having to pay to run Solaris.
Mostly because all of the people that slit their wrists over Solaris's
SMFleft the field. And, let me tell you, when Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) came out, the hue and cry aboutSMFwas similar to that aroundsystemd. ;)What about OpenSuSE ? Both (Tumbleweed and Leap) are good options for those who want to migrate!
OpenSuSE both Tumbleweed and Leap are excellent, I didn't necessarily explore them as much as the others as i haven't had too much experience with them, the ones in the tables are distros that I have the most experience in.
OpenSuSE was a mess. It was the Windows of the Linux distros. Thousand little tools to configure the system. And the gui and the text version of YAST where constantly fighting. That plus the horrible slow rpm package manager threw me away. What I HAVE to thank them for, is the OpenSuse Build Service! That's a VERY good invention of them!
I would recommend Elementary. A new player on the scene with a warming desktop environment and huge community support. If you are interested you can help fund the development effort on their Patreon page
Seen it mentioned a few times around the thread, going to have a little play with it.
The development is really slow. And on low end systems, with a crappy graphic card it's not smooth.
I run Ubuntu exclusively. At work I work on RHEL servers. I tried Fedora at home and was plagued by a login loop. Honestly if you want a Linux OS that just works, and has a huge repository of packages for just about anything, consider Ubuntu or Debian. Currently there really isn't anything I need that I don't have (Atom, Eclipse, python/python3, perl/perl6, rust, FileZilla, PgAdmin3, Dropbox client, Skype, LibreOffice, Chrome, Firefox). I am probably missing something. Another thing I will add is on older hardware Ubuntu installs without issue. My laptop is an old Levovo Thinkpad T series and I have had no installation or performance issues running 18.04.1 LTS.
Also Ubuntu now does not use Unity anymore, now the desktop is Gnome.
Sounds like you missed the joy of the post-Berkeley FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD days. In the waning years of my time at college, those BSDs and Linux were all beta-level offerings. Post college and jonesing for my own UNIX-y system to run at home, I tried all of them. Eventually settled on Linux (with forays into IRIX and Solaris in the mid-90s and then Solaris, AIX and HPUX in the mid-2000s). These days, mostly RHEL/CentOS ...because it's what pays the bills. =)
When SMF first came out, it had a lot of teething pains similar to systemd's. Then again, so did a number of technologies in Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). ZFS, LDOMs and Zones all had their joys. Being a tinkerer, I ended up finding a lot of "edge cases" (as their Support group liked to call them). Fortunately, the most frequent "edge cases" happened at home. That said, during my (third-part vendor-partner) consulting days, I had to help one large financial institution that got bit pretty bad by a scheduler problem on a SF25000 attached to a large EMC array presenting a few thousand LUNs.
At any rate, haven't really touched Solaris since I sat for my Solaris 11 SA test. Sun had offered me it, at the time, as a beta test-taker as part of their efforts to get people to adopt Solaris 11. Other than helping customers move from Solaris to RHEL/CentOS, haven't really had to deal with Solaris since 2008.
All Linux distributions are terrible for their own unique reasons, but they are generally slightly less terrible than Windows and Mac/OS XYZ. I tried Ubuntu first and hated unity. Tried Arch, but was disappointed with the very incomplete installation documentation and eventually gave up. I tried other distributions of Arch, but gave up on them when I found out the Arch community will not help you if you are not using actual Arch. Used Mint for a while, but eventually got really frustrated with how badly Ubuntu maintains the official repos, all the software is super old. Used Solus for a while, but then went back to Unity Ubuntu in order to have a development environment as similar as possible to the production server I write code for. I don't hate unity quite as much as I used to and I am less bothered by having to use PPAs for everything. I was able to make many needed tweeks to my Unity configuration to make it actually pretty decent. My biggest complaints now applying to all distributions I have tried is Android Studio is only not buggy in Windows, multiple desktops don't actually keep running apps separate enough between them, and no I don't want to us a crazy windows manager like awesome or Xmonad to fix that.
Arch's installation process is painful, but there are a lot of installers that can be used to install a working Arch setup, such as Arch-Anywhere (now Anarchy Linux) or Antergos. Both use Arch's repo, unlike Manjaro, where it uses its own repository.
I love BSDs, actually started programming on it with fluxbox as minimalistic desktop manager but now when considering a new OS I have to rule them out because the lack of docker support.
By any chance, do you know if anything has changed (or planned) on this matter ?